A Facebook profile can reveal the real you

Judging a book by its cover may be unwise, but online profiles are fair game, new research suggests. University students considered likeable by people that met them in real life have been found to make a similar impression on people who view their Facebook profiles.

"People who were expressive in tone of voice and facial expression were also socially expressive on Facebook. They posted a lot of pictures, they posted photo albums, they seemed to have a lot of conversations with people," says Max Weisbuch, a psychologist at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts who led the study.

Facebook is a social networking site where each of its 200-million-plus members curate personal pages containing their interests and photos, as well as comments from friends.

Chat cheat

For the study, Weisbuch's team recruited 37 university students, 18 of them women, to come to his lab for a one-on-one chat with another study participant. Weisbuch's team told the two to get to know one another by asking questions for several minutes.

However, one of each pair was actually a researcher masquerading as a student. Afterwards the role-playing researchers, none of whom were members of Weisbuch's team, rated each participant's likeability, based on their tone of voice, how much they smiled, how much they revealed about themselves, and other verbal and nonverbal factors.

Immediately afterward, the researchers downloaded the Facebook profile of the volunteer and asked a panel of 10 students from another university to rate the likeability of its owner. The panel had plenty of information to pass judgement on. The Facebook pages used contained an average of 282 pictures and 868 messages, or "wall" posts, from friends.

The Facebook pages that earned the highest likeability rating were the most expressive, loaded with pictures and wall posts, Weisbuch found. And these people also tended to be rated as the most affable volunteers in person, being assessed by the undercover researcher as being very animated and with expressive body language.

People who talked a lot about themselves in the conversation also tended to share a lot of information on Facebook. But some things appear best kept secret: they also tended to score lower on likeability in person, compared to people who shared less.

Positive glow

It might seem surprising that people draw similar judgements based on brief, impromptu conversations and web pages that can be the product of hours trying to project the right persona. But Catalina Toma, a psychologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, says the fact that people know most of their Facebook friends in real life keeps them honest.

"It doesn't make sense to lie in those profiles, because the social network acts as a constraint on deception," she says. People do not lie because they know they will be caught out.

Instead, Facebook users have the opportunity to highlight flattering information – say a South American vacation – and gloss over more embarrassing characteristics like halitosis. "It's really super easy to portray yourself both positively and accurately in online profiles," Toma says.

In the two years since researchers performed the experiments, Facebook has attracted more users whose college years are long past. "I think you have to be cautious in generalizing the results too far," says Weisbuch, who does not have a profile on the website.

That doesn't mean, he hasn't found the website useful, however. "When I hire someone I might try to check out their Facebook page first," he admits.

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